Fall Out: A Year of Political Mayhem

By Tim Shipman

The unmissable inside story of the most dramatic general election campaign in modern history and Theresa May’s battle for a Brexit deal, the greatest challenge for a prime minister since the Second World War.

By the bestselling author of All Out War, shortlisted for the Orwell Prize 2017.

This is the unmissable inside story of the most dramatic general election campaign in modern history and Theresa May’s battle for a Brexit deal – the greatest challenge for a prime minister since the Second World War.

Fall Out tells of how a leader famed for her caution battled her bitterly divided cabinet at home while facing duplicitous Brussels bureaucrats abroad. Of how she then took the biggest gamble of her career to strengthen her position – and promptly blew it. It is also a tale of treachery where – in the hour of her greatest weakness – one by one, May’s colleagues began to plot against her.

Inside this book you will find all the strategy, comedy, tragedy and farce of modern politics – where principle, passion and vaulting ambition collide in the corridors of power. It chronicles a civil war at the heart of the Conservative Party and a Labour Party back from the dead, led by Jeremy Corbyn, who defied the experts and the critics on his own side to mount an unlikely tilt at the top job.

With access to all the key players, Tim Shipman has written a political history that reads like a thriller, exploring how and why the EU referendum result pitched Britain into a year of political mayhem.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins UK
• Release date: Nov 30, 2017
• ISBN: 9780008264390

Tim Shipman

Tim Shipman is the political editor of the Sunday Times. He has been a national newspaper journalist since 1997 and in sixteen years writing about politics he has also reported from Westminster for the Daily Mail and the Sunday Express.

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Copyright

William Collins

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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2017

Copyright © Tim Shipman 2017

Cover illustration by Morten Morland/Spectator

Tim Shipman asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

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Source ISBN: 9780008264383

Ebook Edition © November 2017 ISBN: 9780008264390

Version: 2022-10-10

Dedication

For Charlotte

Epigraphs

fall out v.

1 quarrel

3 come out of formation

fallout n.

1 radioactive debris caused by a nuclear explosion or accident

2 the adverse side effects of a situation

The Concise Oxford Dictionary (1991 edn)

‘It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood’

Theodore Roosevelt, 23 April 1910

‘Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth’

Mike Tyson

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraphs

Timeline

Introduction: Four Minutes to Ten

PART ONE: GENESIS

1 ‘Brexit Means Brexit’

2 ‘No Running Commentary’

3 The Enemy Gets a Vote

4 Enemies of the People?

5 How Do You Solve a Problem Like Boris?

6 Ivan the Terrible

7 Lancaster House

8 The White House

9 Triggered

PART TWO: HUBRIS

10 ‘Economically Illiterate’

11 The Snarling Duds of May?

PART THREE: NEMESIS

12 Bolt From the Blue

13 Leninists and Lennonists

14 ‘Another Galaxy’

15 Strong and Stable

16 From Sharks to Minnows

17 Manifesto Destiny

18 ‘Nothing Has Changed!’

19 Manchester

20 ‘This Isn’t Working’

21 I, Maybot

22 The Corbyn Surge

23 Political Alchemy

24 London Bridge

25 Mayday!

PART FOUR: CATHARSIS

26 Shellshock

27 The Four Horsemen

28 Florence and the Maychine Malfunction

29 ‘Sufficient Progress …’

Conclusion: May Was Weak in June

Appendix 1: Results of the 2017 Local Elections

Appendix 2: Results of the 2017 General Election

Appendix 3: Chris Wilkins’ Strategy

Appendix 4: Lynton Crosby’s Strategy

Appendix 5: Seumas Milne’s Strategy

List of Illustrations

Picture Section

Notes

Index

Acknowledgements

Also by Tim Shipman

About the Author

About the Publisher

Timeline

2016

23 Jun – Britain votes to leave the European Union by a margin of 52 per cent to 48 per cent

29 Jun – Other 27 member states agree a ‘no negotiations without notification’ stance on Brexit talks and Article 50

13 Jul – Theresa May becomes prime minister and pledges to create ‘a country that works for everyone’

7 Sep – May insists she will not give a ‘running commentary’ on Brexit negotiations

24 Sep – Jeremy Corbyn re-elected as Labour Party leader

30 Sep – Carlos Ghosn, Nissan’s CEO, says he could scrap potential new investment in its Sunderland plant

2 Oct – In Brexit speech to party conference, May says she will trigger Article 50 before the end of March and create a Great Repeal Bill to replace the 1972 European Communities Act

5 Oct – In main speech to party conference, May criticises ‘citizens of nowhere’

6 Oct – Keir Starmer appointed shadow Brexit secretary

27 Oct – Nissan says it will build its Qashqai and X-Trail models at its Sunderland plant, protecting 7,000 jobs

2 Nov – At Spectator awards dinner May compares Boris Johnson to a dog that was put down

3 Nov – High Court rules that only Parliament not the government has the power to trigger Article 50

4 Nov – Daily Mail calls the judges ‘enemies of the people’

8 Nov – Donald Trump elected the 45th president of the United States

14 Nov – FT reveals the EU wants a €60 billion exit bill from Britain

15 Nov – Boris Johnson tells a Czech paper the UK will ‘probably’ leave the customs union and is reprimanded by May

19 Nov – Johnson accused of turning up to a cabinet Brexit meeting with the wrong papers

20 Nov – Sixty pro-Brexit Tory MPs demand Britain leaves the single market

21 Nov – Trump calls for Nigel Farage to be made British ambassador to Washington

7 Dec – MPs back government amendment to opposition day debate saying the government must set out its Brexit plans but also that Article 50 should be triggered by the end of March

8 Dec – Johnson calls Saudi Arabia a ‘puppeteer’ in the Middle East, sparking a rebuke from Downing Street and fears he will resign

11 Dec – Fiona Hill’s ‘Trousergate’ texts to Nicky Morgan, banning her from Downing Street, are published

15 Dec – BBC reveals that Sir Ivan Rogers has privately warned ministers a post-Brexit trade deal might take ten years

2017

4 Jan – Ivan Rogers resigns

10 Jan – Corbyn announces a wage cap in his ‘Trump relaunch’

17 Jan – In speech at Lancaster House May announces Britain will seek a hard Brexit leaving the single market, the customs union and the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice. She says ‘no deal is better than a bad deal’

24 Jan – Supreme Court votes 8–3 to uphold the High Court ruling

25 Jan – Downing Street says Brexit plans will be set out in a white paper

27 Jan – May meets and holds hands with Trump at the White House

1 Feb – Article 50 bill passes second reading by 498 votes to 114

2 Feb – White paper published echoing the Lancaster House speech

7 Feb – Government defeats amendment 110 which would have given Parliament the right to a vote on Brexit following a deal with Team 2019 Tory rebels

9 Feb – Article 50 bill passes Commons by 494 votes to 122

16 Feb – May’s aides hold strategy meeting at Chequers for the 2020 election

17 Feb – Tony Blair makes a speech urging Britons to ‘rise up’ against Brexit

7 Mar – House of Lords amends Article 50 bill to guarantee a ‘meaningful vote’ on Brexit deal. Lord Heseltine sacked

8 Mar – In his spring budget, Philip Hammond raises National Insurance contributions for the self-employed

13 Mar – Nicola Sturgeon confirms she will ask for permission to hold a second referendum on Scottish independence, playing into Ruth Davidson’s hands

14 Mar – Article 50 bill finally gets royal assent

15 Mar – May forces Hammond into humiliating U-turn on National Insurance

17 Mar – George Osborne named editor of the Evening Standard, overshadowing May’s Plan for Britain

29 Mar – May signs letter triggering Article 50

18 Apr – May announces that she is calling a general election

26 Apr – May dines with Jean-Claude Juncker at Downing Street. Details of the meal leak and are blamed on his chief of staff Martin Selmayr

4 May – In local elections Tories make big gains

10 May – Labour manifesto leaks

16 May – Labour manifesto published

18 May – Conservative manifesto published, includes plans for a controversial social care policy

21 May – Polls show Tory support ‘dropping off a cliff’. Lynton Crosby says care could lose the election

22 May – May U-turns, scrapping the care plan but insisting ‘nothing has changed’. Manchester Arena terror attack that night leads to a pause in the campaign

24 May – In Downing Street meeting, May is warned the numbers are bad

3 Jun – London Bridge terror attack puts police cuts at the top of the agenda

8 Jun – General election: the Conservatives win 317 seats, down thirteen and lose their majority. Labour gains thirty seats

9 Jun – May visits the queen and says she has a deal with the DUP then fails to apologise for losing seats

11 Jun – Nick Timothy and Fiona Hill resign as chiefs of staff

12 Jun – May apologises to 1922 Committee and endures criticism from ministers in cabinet

14 Jun – Grenfell Tower disaster plunges the government into a new crisis and May into a ‘personal crisis’

19 Jun – First round of Davis–Barnier Brexit negotiations

26 Jun – Andrew Mitchell and Nicky Morgan tell One Nation dinner Theresa May should resign

6 Jul – CBI demands a transition period with no time limits

20 Jul – Second round of Davis–Barnier talks

31 Aug – Third round of Davis–Barnier talks ends in fractious deadlock

7 Sep – Select group of cabinet ministers shown policy paper by Oliver Robbins setting out plans for May’s Florence speech

12 Sep – Philip Hammond tells Lords Economic Affairs Committee there must be a ‘status quo’ transition

15 Sep – Boris Johnson publishes 4,200-word article in the Daily Telegraph challenging May’s authority on Brexit

18 Sep – Oliver Robbins leaves DExEU to run Cabinet Office Brexit unit

22 Sep – During speech in Florence, May says Britain will seek a status quo transition lasting ‘about’ two years and hints the UK will pay €20 billion to the EU in that time

30 Sep – Johnson sets out his four ‘red lines’ for Brexit

4 Oct – Theresa May’s conference speech descends into disaster

16 Oct – May dines with Jean-Claude Juncker. A leak suggests she was ‘begging’ for help

19 Oct – At Brussels summit, May pleads with EU leaders to get the trade talks moving

22 Nov – Hammond’s second budget of the year cuts stamp duty for first-time buyers

4 Dec – DUP pulls the plug on May’s exit deal, plunging the talks into fresh crisis

8 Dec – May strikes phase one Brexit deal when Commission pronounces that ‘sufficient progress’ has been made on money, citizens and the Irish border

Introduction

Four Minutes to Ten

The first clue that something was wrong was the look on Fiona Hill’s face. One of Theresa May’s two chiefs of staff emerged from the safe space reserved for the senior staff at the rear of the war room in Conservative Campaign Headquarters. She was looking for the other chief, Nick Timothy. Hill was a thin and elegantly dressed brunette in her early forties whose waif-like appearance concealed a backbone of pure galvanised steel. ‘Where’s Nick?’ she asked. Her voice was a sweet Scottish lilt that belied a tongue which could crack like a whip. Hill was a figure of authority but her voice betrayed her nervousness. ‘Her face was just white,’ a witness recalled.

In the weeks to come those who were there would see the next few moments unfold again and again in their mind’s eye like a Martin Scorsese film, indelible images that jump-cut into a portrait of unfolding disaster. A member of the Conservative media team, which Hill had commanded for the previous seven weeks, said, ‘I looked at her and thought, That’s not somebody who’s been told good news. She grabbed Nick and took him to the Derby room.’ It was Thursday 8 June. Election day. The aide looked at his watch, so he would remember the time. ‘The moment I knew it was fucked was at 9.56 p.m.,’ he said.

Nick Timothy looked both like he meant business and like an egghead – fitting for one of the best Conservative policy brains of his generation. Like many political players he was a figure of contradictions, sometimes easy company, smoothly charming to both men and women. He spoke with an accent that betrayed a little of his Midlands upbringing and a great deal of the relentless inner drive that had taken him from working-class Birmingham to the pinnacle of a Conservative government. Thirty-seven and balding on top, Timothy had become a recognisable public figure thanks to the lustrous beard he wore, which would not have looked out of place on a nineteenth-century Russian novelist. In Tory circles ‘Timmy’ was most usually compared to the 3rd Marquess of Salisbury, the last Tory prime minister to sit in the House of Lords.

When Hill and Timothy emerged from the side room and made their way to the safe space again, others, anxious now, stood rooted to the spot. ‘The two of them were the only people moving,’ one recalled. A Conservative special adviser – a ‘spad’ to all those in Westminster – turned to Liz Sanderson, one of May’s Downing Street staff, and asked what sort of percentage lead the Tories would need in the exit poll to have a good night. ‘I don’t know what good is supposed to look like,’ the adviser said. As Big Ben struck ten, the BBC’s David Dimbleby announced that Britain was on course for a hung Parliament. The Conservatives were set to lose seats. ‘It dropped on the screen and I thought, Well it ain’t fucking that. I burst into laughter because that is my reaction to anything totally catastrophic.’

No one else was laughing. ‘The whole place was like someone had been murdered,’ another spad recalled. There was a paralysing quiet. ‘Panic looked like the most wonderfully British panic, which was total fucking silence,’ a Downing Street official said. ‘The air just went from the room. It was like a vacuum.’

Hill and Timothy spoke to Theresa May by phone. The prime minister was at home in her Maidenhead constituency. They agreed to await the results. Inside, May prepared for the worst. She had already had a little cry. After a seven-week campaign which was supposed to be a victory lap, May had taken her party backwards. Over the next eight hours, her expected majority of sixty or more dissolved into a net loss of thirteen seats. Conservative staff fell into a deep depression. The campaign had not been enjoyable but the prospect of victory had kept them going. Now that was gone. ‘I felt like Andy Dufresne in The Shawshank Redemption,’ one spad said. ‘I had crawled through a mile of shit and there was supposed to be a boat or money or Morgan Freeman coming to hug me at the end. Instead, it was just a pile of poo, and I was stuck in a pond with the rain pouring down on me.’

The political implications were as acute as the personal. A prime minister who had seemed impregnably strong was suddenly dangerously weak and fighting for her career. An election called to strengthen Britain’s hand in negotiations on the country’s exit from the European Union – ‘Brexit’ as it was now known to everyone – had left the UK disempowered at a critical moment in her history. May’s two closest aides, who had been as dominant a duopoly as 10 Downing Street has ever seen, saw their power evaporate. Timothy and Hill had helped to create the public being of Theresa May. They were her greatest cheerleaders and defenders. Now they were to be sacrificial lambs for the disaster that was unfolding, their best service to throw themselves to the wolves so that she might escape their jaws.

It had all been very different on results night a year earlier. Nick Timothy was in a remote Sicilian mountain-top village with his then fiancée Nike Trost on the night of the EU referendum. He was a convinced Brexiteer but did not think Leave would win. Halfway through the night his phone began beeping with messages saying ‘Are you watching?’ Timothy took out his laptop and began live streaming Sky News as the biggest electoral earthquake in modern political history unfolded. His partner, a German citizen, realised what was happening and groaned, ‘Oh my God!’ By dawn it was clear that, after forty-four years, Britain had voted to leave the European Union by a margin of 52 per cent to 48 per cent.

Over his hotel breakfast, Timothy watched David Cameron resign as prime minister. A German family at the next table lectured him about how bad the result was for Europe. The Italian woman who owned the hotel was more enthusiastic: ‘This is British Brexit, it’s the Italians next!’ As the sun came out Timothy and Trost booked their flights home. He knew this was a defining moment in his life. By then he had already spoken with the two other women in his life: Theresa May and Fiona Hill. For a decade they had discussed how to make the Conservative Party more electable and had quietly positioned May for a tilt at the top. Timothy had a leadership campaign to run, perhaps a country to run. This time he was convinced he would win. This is a play with many actors, but overwhelmingly it is the story of those three people and how they took charge of the most complex political conundrum since the Second World War, one which unfolded in the small hours of 23 June 2016.

The road that brought them to that moment four minutes before ten has many tributaries. The first came in a geography tutorial meeting at Oxford University in the mid-1970s when the young Theresa Brasier turned to a fellow student, Alicia Collinson, and first expressed a desire to become prime minister. Collinson was already the girlfriend of another future cabinet minister, Damian Green, and the two students spent their university years in a social circle around the Conservative Association and the Oxford Union which included others who would find future fame in Westminster: Alan Duncan, Michael Crick and Philip Hammond. Brasier’s most significant meeting in those years – famously at the instigation of Benazir Bhutto, the future leader of Pakistan – was with Philip May, a president of the union who was to become her husband in 1980 and her ‘rock’ thereafter.

The serious, dogged devotion to ‘public service’ and May’s occasionally pious insistence that her only goal was to ‘do what I think is right’ appeared to come from her father, Anglican vicar the Revd Hubert Brasier. The cabinet colleague who said, ‘She is extraordinarily self-contained,’ sought an explanation no deeper than her status as an only child, the death of both her parents in her mid-twenties and the Mays’ subsequent discovery that they could not have children. Hubert Brasier died in a car crash in October 1981; his wife Zaidee succumbed to multiple sclerosis a few months later. Bill Clinton, Tony Blair and Barack Obama all lost parents when they were young.

When Andrea Leadsom, against whom May faced off for the Tory leadership in July 2016, questioned her suitability for the job because she was not a mother, it was Leadsom who was forced to drop out. Yet the questions she raised about May’s emotional intelligence were to become a feature of her difficulties eleven months later. Leadsom had been the third major rival to self-immolate. George Osborne had gone down with David Cameron’s ship after lashing himself to the mast of the Remain campaign during the EU referendum. Then, as the battle to replace him began, Boris Johnson showed less commitment to victory than his campaign manager, Michael Gove, would have liked, prompting Gove to declare him unfit for the top job, a shot fired from such an angle that it ricocheted into Gove’s own foot. The result was that May inherited the Tory crown without either her colleagues or herself learning what she was like under sustained fire during a campaign. They were soon to know.

Those looking for clues about the sort of prime minister she would be would have found contradictory messages from her past. After twelve years at the Bank of England and a council career in Merton, south-west London, where she crossed paths with another future colleague, Chris Grayling, May became an MP in the Labour landslide of 1997. These were the darkest days of opposition. She was the first of her intake into the shadow cabinet two years later. Initially, May was seen as a moderniser. As the first female party chairman in 2002, she delivered a few home truths from the conference platform, urging the grassroots to change. ‘You know what people call us? The nasty party.’ Katie Perrior, May’s press mouthpiece at the time, recalled, ‘The traditionalists around Iain Duncan Smith, the Tory leader, were ordering Mrs May to remove the words nasty party from the speech. On the floor below, a gang of modernisers including Mrs May, staring two huge electoral defeats in the face, were thinking there was not much to lose and were determined to press on.’1 May did not endorse the ‘nasty party’ label but to many members she had legitimised criticism of her own team. Yet, her analysis that the public were losing faith in politics was ahead of its time.

May’s appointment as home secretary by David Cameron in 2010, when the coalition government was formed, added further layers of complexity to her politics. Cameron joked that he and May were the only two ministers who supported the Tory commitment to reduce net immigration to the ‘tens of thousands’. Yet May also led a crackdown on police ‘stop and search’ powers, which she felt were directed unfairly at young black men, and a crusade to stamp out modern slavery. May was hard to categorise politically. Nick Timothy said, ‘Those things aren’t mutually exclusive but hearing it from the same person leads people to think, I don’t really understand what that person stands for. She doesn’t allow herself to be put into ideological boxes.’2 Colleagues think being home secretary changed her. A former special adviser said, ‘If you spend years and years saying something you do end up believing it. When she was shadow work and pensions I used to work with her on things like parental leave. She was into gender equality and social liberalism. Being home secretary for six years does something to you.’ Willie Whitelaw, who lost the 1975 leadership contest to Margaret Thatcher and then became her home secretary, is said to have remarked that no home secretary should ever become prime minister because they spend their time trying to stop things from happening rather than leading from the front.

The pattern May set in the first decade became a blueprint for her premiership – pathological caution punctuated by moments of great boldness and bravery. She fought a tenacious and ultimately successful battle to deport Abu Qatada, the ‘hate preacher’ branded Osama bin Laden’s ambassador in Europe – in the face of a Human Rights Act that appeared to make it impossible. She woke up one morning in 2012 and used the human rights of Asperger’s sufferer Gary McKinnon as reason not to deport him to face hacking charges in the United States, a decision that took guts even if it did virtually guarantee the support of the Daily Mail, which had been campaigning for McKinnon, in a future leadership contest. Former Home Office official Alasdair Palmer said, ‘When she is convinced that her cause is right, May can be determined, even obstinate.’

In the Cameron cabinet, May was an oddity, someone the Cameroons would have liked to ignore but knew they could not. Her abilities and virtues stood in direct counterpoint to those of Cameron and his sidekick George Osborne. Where Cameron excelled at presentation and pulling victory from the jaws of defeat with glib displays of concentration and political charisma, May was a grinder, a determined reader of documents who moved towards her conclusions with all the facility of a static caravan on a low loader. Having reached those conclusions, she was unbending in their defence however inconvenient her colleagues found it.

Where Cameron was open, May was secretive. One civil service official said May and her Home Office permanent secretary Helen Ghosh ‘would go for weeks without speaking’. May regularly kept both Number 10’s staff and her own in the dark about her intentions. A longstanding aide added, ‘She’ll tell you the truth. If she doesn’t want to tell you, she won’t make any bones about it, she just won’t tell you. That’s not an insult, it’s just that she’s keeping her own counsel.’ Where Osborne was imaginatively political and tactical, May obsessed about doing the right thing after due consideration, sticking to her principles. ‘Politics,’ she was fond of saying, ‘is not a game.’ Cameron and Osborne revelled in being the best game players in town.

While the Cameroons shared dinner parties as well as political views, May dined in the Commons with her husband. In her leadership launch speech, she explained, ‘I don’t gossip about people over lunch. I don’t go drinking in Parliament’s bars.’ A senior party official said, ‘She is the least clubbable politician I know.’ Alasdair Palmer had a typical lunch experience: ‘She lacks the personal charm of most politicians. Conversation was not easy. Somewhat to my alarm, May had no small talk whatsoever. She was perfectly comfortable with silence, which I found extremely disorienting.’3 This detachment would continue in Downing Street, where one aide observed, ‘She’s so removed from the world her colleagues live in.’ The aide said, ‘Gavin [Williamson, the chief whip] would come in and explain that this MP was having an affair. The ins and outs stuff the whips call it. She’d just be exasperated and say, Why can’t they just do the job.’

There was a peculiarly English social edge to May’s differences with the Cameroons. They were public schoolboys, easy company in the salons of the capital; she was a provincial grammar-school girl with no small talk. Although she and Cameron shared a home counties Conservatism, his social circle touched the lower hem of the aristocracy while May was the product of genteel vicarage austerity. Cameron’s Christianity, it was said, ‘comes and goes’ like ‘Magic FM in the Chilterns’; May’s was steadfast if seldom talked about. Where Cameron’s approach to those less well-off found voice in a Macmillanite soft paternalism, May’s simmered with the determined rage of one disgusted by injustice, but a rage that her buttoned-up personality never quite allowed her to express in a way that would have turned voters’ heads.

May’s ordinariness was on display when she moved into Downing Street. The new prime minister was asked whether she wanted the gents’ loo outside her office converted for her use. It had previously been for the sole use of Cameron. May replied, ‘Absolutely not, I’m not wasting a penny of taxpayers’ money. I’ll go down the corridor like everybody else.’ The same humble approach ensured she went door-knocking in her constituency every weekend. Hill explained to friends, ‘She thinks if she underestimates Corbyn and Labour then it will come back to bite her in the bum. She doesn’t take her majority for granted.’ Another aide saw it as a chance of escape: ‘There is a point where she has had enough of being in Number 10. It’s a decompression thing, when she goes back and has that connectivity with people that she is comfortable with. When she doesn’t have that she gets ratty and you can see the pressure start to build on her.’

May preferred people with knowledge rather than rank. ‘She didn’t want senior bullshitters,’ a Downing Street aide said, ‘she wanted younger people who knew what they were talking about.’ A civil servant saw the same down-to-earth approach: ‘The custodial staff in Number 10 and the ones who take her tea or sandwiches, they were all happier when she arrived after Cameron because she would address them by name. They felt that she treated them like people who were helping her rather than lackeys.’

May’s social awkwardness and secrecy meant even close colleagues knew little about her. Some who worked closely with her were perplexed by the efforts of journalists and MPs to discover the ‘real’ Theresa May. One Tory who worked for her said, ‘I’m not sure there’s much there. She’s very sensible. There’s no interest in ideas. Philip is a very sweet man but it takes a certain type of character to marry someone who is so bland. Their conversation is completely banal.’

May appeared determined, even when she became prime minister, to deny there was any such thing as ‘Mayism’. ‘She’s quite anti-intellectual,’ a former minister said. ‘She’s not a great thinker. To admit of an ism would be to suggest there was a great Heseltinian long-term plan to be leader – which of course there was.’ The plan, though, was not May’s but that of Nick Timothy and Fiona Hill.

The fact that Theresa May seemed the only possible option for prime minister by 13 July 2016 was the work of her two closest aides, who were rewarded with the top staff jobs in Downing Street – for ever more known as ‘the chiefs’. Nick Timothy grew up in a working-class family in the Tile Cross district of Birmingham. His father left school at fourteen and worked his way up from the factory floor to become head of international sales at a local steel works. His mother did secretarial work at a school. Margaret Thatcher converted his parents to the Tory Party and Timothy was politicised by the 1992 general election because the Labour Party was threatening to close the grammar school – Edward VI Aston School – which had given him a chance in life. He went on to get a first-class degree in politics from Sheffield University and then landed a job in the Conservative research department, where his path first crossed with May’s.

May and Timothy quickly realised they were political soulmates. Over a period of fifteen years they fashioned an analysis of how the Conservative Party should reposition itself to broaden its appeal, with ‘a conservatism that is about the welfare and interests of the whole of the country across class divides and geographical divides’ and the belief that ‘there needs to be more of a role for the state’. Katie Perrior said, ‘For her it was always about putting the party back in touch with ordinary working people – the Conservatives should no longer be the party of the rich and the privileged.’4 A colleague of Timothy said, ‘He wanted to complete the process of Tory modernisation, but his brand of modernisation was always about class.’ Timothy was adamant that he was not ‘Theresa’s brain’, the title he had been awarded by journalists. ‘Suggesting I’m the creator of those ideas is absurd and insulting to her,’ he said. ‘I do think there’s more than a hint of sexism.’5 A cabinet minister close to May agreed: ‘The idea that she is this wax palette which can be inscribed by this curious pair is not correct. She has a very, very strong sense of public service and believes from a place deep within herself that injustice is wrong.’ Like May, Timothy was a man of contradictions. ‘He’s very traditional,’ a close friend said. ‘Even as a twenty-something he had a flat that looked like a man in his mid-forties. It’s all old-fashioned paintings and dark antique furniture.’ Yet this arch-Brexiteer’s two longest relationships had been with European women, a Belgian and a German.

In 2006, Timothy met Fiona Hill outside The Speaker pub in Westminster and the cerebral staff officer acquired an artillery commander. ‘I just immediately knew we were politically in the exact same place,’ she told friends. Hill had a blunter approach, once declaring, ‘We fucking hate socialism and we want to crush it in a generation.’ Hill also came from a poor background, growing up in Greenock outside Glasgow. She forced her way into a job on the Scotsman newspaper, writing football reports and features, developing the news sense and sharp elbows that would take her to Sky News, where she worked on the newsdesk and met her husband, Tim Cunningham, whose name she was to take until they divorced. When she joined the Conservative Party press office in 2006 Timothy introduced her to May. ‘They know each other inside out,’ said one who has worked closely with both. ‘Sometimes Fi can say something and Nick will say, That was literally in my head. They both like working hard. It sounds too pious to say they believe in fairness, but they do – and that is what they share with Theresa.’

Hill and Timothy were equals but Hill’s media background meant she was seen by the outside world as primarily a communications professional. As someone who had helped May develop legislation on modern slavery and domestic violence it grated. ‘She’s very sensitive about the idea that Nick is the policy brain and she’s just a comms person,’ a colleague said. Hill was also resentful of claims that she was May’s personal stylist, even though she did advise her on clothes. On one foreign trip Hill erupted with rage when the events team passed her May’s handbag. It made her late for a meeting with Vladimir Putin. ‘They never give Nick the handbag,’ she complained to Katie Perrior. ‘What am I? The fucking handbag carrier?’ When Perrior said she would take the handbag instead, Hill attacked: ‘This is why you don’t have any gravitas – because you’re willing to take the handbag.’ In pointing out the different treatment of Timothy and the senior women, Hill had a point.

Colleagues say Hill’s most important attribute – in matters of both policy and appearance – was to act as May’s cheering section, boosting her morale. ‘Fi operates as the emotional support: You’re fine, you look great, you don’t need to care about this,’ a colleague said. At one meeting in Downing Street May had been put off by something. ‘Fi leant across and put her hand on her arm and said, Don’t worry, we said there would be days like this,’ a witness said. ‘I thought that was a tragic sight, but it also illustrated how connected she is to both of them. They are literally the people who reach out and put an arm around her and tell her it is going to be all right.’ A senior Home Office official agreed: ‘Theresa was unable to take big decisions without the clear steer and guidance of Fiona.’

The relationship between Timothy and Hill was compared by colleagues to that between brother and sister or even lovers, which they had never been – often fractious but with a united front presented to the world. ‘They never let a cigarette paper come between them in public,’ a colleague said. Another observed, ‘They’re like siblings, they fight a lot. They don’t care what they say about each other. But there’s a loyalty there. It doesn’t matter what they’ve done, it doesn’t matter how bad the other person’s behaved, they’ll always cover the other’s arse.’

Timothy and Hill had a devotion to May which surpassed the usual relationship between politician and staff. A former minister who discussed May with Timothy recalled, ‘I was talking about her appeal, I said, I know this sounds almost religious which it’s not, and he said something like, Yes, it is religious.’ Timothy was joking but his zeal left an impression on the MP: ‘That was a glimpse of how strongly her supporters had come to see her as the messiah.’

Together, ‘the twins’ set themselves up as May’s gatekeepers. ‘You had to go through them for everything,’ a senior Border Force official said. Some said May’s personal limitations and lack of feel for people meant she needed Hill and Timothy’s guidance. ‘She didn’t have the character to elicit the information she might want,’ a Home Office official said, ‘or know what’s true and what’s not true. You and I will hear a story and know if it’s right or not. I think she found that very difficult. She became reliant on others to do that screening, shielding, interpreting on her behalf.’ Others disliked the way Hill and Timothy substituted their judgement for May’s. When Alasdair Palmer, a Home Office speechwriter, did once see the home secretary alone, he wrote the speech to reflect May’s views and then submitted it to the twins. Hill asked, ‘Have you been talking to the home secretary?’ Palmer said he had. ‘I thought so,’ she said. ‘I don’t think she should say these things.’ Palmer suggested that was up to May. ‘It’s up to me,’ Hill said.6

Their determination to go to any lengths to protect May led to disaster in June 2014. Hill’s downfall came as a result of a feud between May’s team and Michael Gove, then the education secretary, over the issue of extremism in schools. Gove briefed journalists from The Times that the Home Office was to blame for the failure to tackle the so-called ‘Trojan Horse’ plot to take over schools in Birmingham. He singled out for criticism Charles Farr, director of the Office for Security and Counter-Terrorism, saying officials only took on Islamist extremists when they turned to violence, an approach Gove compared to ‘just beating back the crocodiles that come close to the boat rather than draining the swamp’. At that time Farr was in a relationship with Hill.

Furious, she retaliated by releasing onto the Home Office website a letter May had written to Gove, accusing his department of failing to act when concerns about the Birmingham schools were brought to its attention in 2010. The document was published in the small hours of the morning, after Hill and Timothy had enjoyed a night out at the Loose Box restaurant in Westminster with journalists from the Daily Mail. To make matters worse, Hill gave quotes to journalists suggesting Gove had endangered children. ‘Lord knows what more they have overlooked on the subject of the protection of kids in state schools,’ she said. ‘It scares me.’ Following an investigation by Sir Jeremy Heywood, the cabinet secretary, David Cameron ordered that Hill be sacked, and that Gove issue a written apology to both May and Farr.

Hill found work at the Centre for Social Justice, a thinktank founded by Iain Duncan Smith, where she wrote a report calling for more effort by the authorities to tackle modern slavery, before taking up a post at lobbying firm Lexington Communications.

Timothy got his comeuppance a few months later in December 2014 when he and Stephen Parkinson – another of May’s Home Office special advisers – were kicked off the list of Conservative candidates for refusing to campaign in the Rochester by-election. The decision was taken by Grant Shapps, then the party chairman, who had decreed that all candidates and special advisers had to help out. Shapps felt they ‘thought themselves above the process’ and made an example of them. May phoned Shapps twice to ask for their reinstatement and also collared him in the margins of a cabinet meeting, but he stood firm. He reflected afterwards that, despite being a cabinet colleague for three years, it was the only time May had bothered to talk to him. It was a ripple in a pool which was to have further implications later.

In July 2015, Timothy became director of the New Schools Network. Yet he continued to exercise influence from afar, contacting his protégé Will Tanner, another special adviser, regularly about the running of May’s office. A year later the gang was back together in Number 10. An MP close to May summed up the relationship: ‘She wouldn’t be in Downing Street without their support. And she wouldn’t have got to Downing Street, if she didn’t have something about her. What Nick and Fi added to that was the ability to make the political weather. Very few people are capable of that.’

Thrown into the deep end, May’s authenticity made her popular. A cabinet colleague said, ‘There are a very small collection of politicians who are immediately attractive to the public, because they’re normal human beings, they see someone who’s true to themselves – Ken Clarke is the classic example. You will never hear Ken say something in private that he would not say in public. The PM is the same.’ During the leadership contest, Clarke had given May a helping hand, calling her a ‘bloody difficult woman’. May adopted the phrase as her calling card. Those looking for her weaknesses might have reflected that Clarke had explained her better than she had ever managed herself.

There were other clues too about what was to come. During the leadership election one of her aides said, ‘A large number of MPs said I’m backing Theresa because she came to my constituency for the dinner fifteen years ago, and I’ve never forgotten it. She has met and engaged with a huge number of people, and most of those people really like her. The problem is people who’ve never engaged with her. And that’s where her appeal falls short. She can’t stand on a stage.’ An official who worked with May in the Home Office said, ‘She instils loyalty in people when you’re close. At a distance, it’s much more difficult to get that. She doesn’t reach out to people. She knows who she is and expects you to come to her.’ Knowing how difficult that was for May, Hill and Timothy devised for her a ‘submarine strategy’ whereby she kept her head down, surfacing rarely to make carefully planned set-piece interventions. At the Home Office, where most news is bad news, it was a shrewd strategy. May dodged public scrutiny but made three of the boldest speeches of the Cameron years – a 2013 party conference speech which was a leadership pitch in all but name; a 2014 warning to the Police Federation that officers should ‘face up to reality’; and a party conference speech in 2015 in which she threw raw red meat to the party faithful on immigration that earned her the appellation ‘Enoch Powell in a dress’.

In Number 10, Hill and Timothy took the same approach. On the steps of Downing Street May gave a very well received speech vowing to ‘fight against the burning injustices’ of poverty, race, class and health and make Britain ‘a country that works for everyone’. When it came time to set out May’s plans for Brexit, they knew it was the moment to write a big speech.

PART ONE

GENESIS

THE BATTLE FOR BREXIT

September 2016 to March 2017

1

‘Brexit Means Brexit’

It all began with a phrase and an idea. The phrase, in a perfect encapsulation of so much that was to follow, was part Nick Timothy, part Theresa May. The two of them and Fiona Hill were in May’s parliamentary office. It was July 2016 and David Cameron had resigned. The Conservative leadership contest was under way and they were discussing how May, a leading though not prominent Remainer, could reassure the party base that she would respect the results of the EU referendum. As they tossed around phrases, Timothy said, ‘Brexit means Brexit,’ at which point May chimed in, mimicking the jingle-like cadence Timothy had used and adding the coda, ‘… and we’ll make a success of it’.

It was a phrase, as Timothy was to put it, ‘with many lives’. The immediate purpose ‘was to be very clear that she, as someone who had voted remain, respected the result and Brexit was going to happen’. In the months to come the phrase evolved. ‘It also became a message to people who didn’t like the result that they had to respect it. Brexit had to mean actually leaving and limiting the relationship, not having us effectively rejoin.’

‘Brexit means Brexit’ was a statement of intent, but there was still the question of what that meant in practice. Britain had voted to leave the European Union, but the destination had not been on the ballot paper. The Leave campaign deliberately never specified which model of future relationship should be pursued. Public debate dissolved into whether the UK would mimic Norway, Switzerland, Turkey or Canada.

Norway was a member of the European Economic Area (EEA) along with all twenty-eight EU countries, plus Liechtenstein and Iceland, giving it full membership of the single market, an area of 500 million people within which the free movement of goods, capital, services and labour – the ‘four freedoms’ – was guaranteed. While outside the European Union, Norway paid money into the EU budget and had to agree to all the standards and regulations of the market, except those on agriculture, fisheries, and justice and home affairs. The downside was that Norway was a ‘rule taker, not a rule maker’ and had no say over the future rules of the market.

Switzerland was a member of the European Free Trade Association (EFTA) but not of the single market, and its access to the market was governed by a series of more than one hundred bilateral agreements with the EU governing key sectors of the economy, though crucially not its banking or services sector. The Swiss made a smaller financial contribution to the budget than Norway and had to implement EU regulations to enable trade. A referendum in 2014 to end the free movement of people had led to retaliation from the EU.

Turkey, like Andorra and San Marino, was in a customs union with the EU, while outside the EEA and EFTA. That meant it faced no quotas, tariffs, taxes and duties on imports or exports on industrial goods sold into the EU and had to apply the EU’s external tariff on goods imported from the rest of the world. The deal did not extend to services or agricultural goods.

Canada had just concluded a comprehensive economic and trade agreement (CETA) with the EU after seven years of negotiations, which eliminated tariffs on most goods, excluding services and sensitive food items like eggs and chicken. The deal gave Canada preferential access to the single market without many of the obligations faced by Norway and Switzerland, for goods that were entirely ‘made in Canada’, but for Britain it would not have given the financial services sector ‘passporting’ rights to operate in the EU.

The alternative to all these models was to leave with no deal and revert to the rules of the World Trade Organisation (WTO), which imposed set tariffs on different products. Supporters of free trade said the average 3 per cent tariffs were not burdensome but on cars, a key industry for Britain, they were 10 per cent. Removing all tariffs would also be expected to see the market flooded with cheap food and steel, threatening the UK’s farming and manufacturing.

At this point the phrase ‘soft Brexit’ was taken to mean membership of the single market and the customs union, while ‘hard Brexit’ meant an alternative arrangement, though these terms were to evolve.

This approach was anathema to May, who rejected all attempts to compare the deal Britain might negotiate to any of the existing models. She told her aides, ‘That’s entirely the wrong way of looking at it.’ From the beginning May knew she wanted a new bespoke deal for Britain. The prime minister, with encouragement from Hill, saw the process as similar to negotiation she had carried out as home secretary in October 2012 when she opted out of 130 EU directives on justice and home affairs and then negotiated re-entry into thirty-five of them, including the European Arrest Warrant, several months later. ‘We have already done what was in effect an EU negotiation,’ a source close to May said. ‘We know how it works, we know what levers to pull and we know how to get what we want out of a negotiation.’

The first thing they wanted – the big idea – was a dedicated department to run Brexit. May, Hill and Timothy believed the ‘bandwidth’ in Whitehall was seriously lacking. ‘We knew we’d have a big challenge to get preparation for Brexit up and running quickly,’ a source close to May said. During a meeting in Nick Timothy’s front room the weekend before May became leader they decided they would create a standalone department, a move that put noses out of joint at the Foreign Office and the Treasury in particular. ‘We know Whitehall, we know how it works,’ the source said. ‘Unless you have a standalone department heading in the same direction then everyone works in silos.’ It was the first of many decisions with far-reaching consequences made on the hoof.

The idea of a new department for Brexit was enthusiastically supported by Sir Jeremy Heywood. The owlish cabinet secretary was a problem solver par excellence who had made himself indispensable to four prime ministers in succession, but his enemies saw a mandarin whose first priority in all situations was to maintain his own power base. As the official who had carried out the review that led to Hill’s departure from the Home Office, Heywood was understandably on edge after Team May’s arrival in Number 10. Under Cameron, the cabinet secretary had been driven to Downing Street every morning and then walked through Number 10 to the Cabinet Office. It was a symbol of his status. ‘When she came in that changed, he went through the Cabinet Office door,’ a senior civil servant said. ‘That was symbolic, putting him in his place.’

Heywood and May were well acquainted. They had dined together when she was home secretary. ‘He used to say that he didn’t look forward to these dinners because they had run out of things to talk about by the main course,’ a fellow mandarin recalled. However, the dinners served a purpose on both sides. ‘She did it because she was paranoid about what the centre was saying about her and it was a way of finding out,’ the mandarin said. Heywood, meanwhile, was spying for Cameron, who wanted to know what May wasn’t telling him. ‘In the Home Office she pulled up the drawbridge,’ said the mandarin. ‘It was like Gordon Brown times two.’

Keeping his job meant Heywood supporting the creation of new departments, even though that put him at odds with other senior civil servants like Sir Ivan Rogers, Britain’s permanent representative in Brussels – effectively the UK’s ambassador to the EU. Rogers – an intense character with a high forehead who spoke at one hundred miles an hour – felt that setting up new departments would consume the time and energy of officials that could have been better directed at the details of a potential deal.

The other issue facing Heywood was that almost no preparations had been done for Brexit, since Cameron had banned the civil service from working on contingency plans in the run-up to the referendum. The cabinet secretary had hoped to spend the summer getting the civil service ready but the earlier-than-expected end to the Tory leadership contest put paid to that. ‘We were caught flat footed,’ a senior civil servant admitted. One of May’s team said, ‘I remember thinking when I got to Number 10 that the absence of any real thinking about this massive issue the country was facing was really quite remarkable.’ Some said Heywood should have ignored Cameron. ‘It’s rather shocking that they did no preparations for Brexit,’ a Tory peer said. ‘They had a moral duty to prepare. People should have called for Jeremy’s head.’

The Department for Exiting the European Union (DExEU, pronounced Dex-ee-oo) was born out of the European and Global Issues Secretariat, a group of forty officials in the Cabinet Office, and quickly cannibalised the European affairs staff of the Foreign Office as well on its way to engaging more than four hundred staff. From early in her leadership campaign, May knew who she wanted to run DExEU – David Davis. ‘DD’, as he is known in Westminster, had been a whip during the passage of the Maastricht Treaty and then John Major’s Europe minister, jobs he had done with the devil-may-care bravado of an ex-SAS territorial, which remained the most interesting line on his CV and gave him an air of menacing charm that he had put to good use over the years. Davis finished second to Cameron in the 2005 leadership contest before throwing away his frontbench career as shadow home secretary with a maverick decision to resign his seat and fight a by-election to highlight civil liberties issues. That finished him with the Cameroons and paved the way for May to become home secretary. Davis became May’s most obstreperous backbench opponent during her time at the Home Office. A vociferous critic of the snooper state, he even joined forces with Labour’s Tom Watson to take ministers to court over the government’s surveillance powers. However, these confrontations had bred mutual respect not contempt – and crucially had even impressed Hill, whose stance towards May’s political enemies more usually resembled that of a lioness protecting her cubs. She told a friend, ‘He’s an absolute pro and having been on the receiving end of his campaigning for things like counter-terrorism laws I know how good he is. When he came onto the leadership team we really hit it off.’

Having been given a chance to do a serious job in government, Davis resolved to make himself useful to May and not allow policy differences to open between DExEU and Downing Street. ‘He decided he wanted to be a political consigliere to her,’ a source said. Davis’s attempts to ingratiate himself with May went to extreme lengths. ‘She and DD had this hideous flirting thing going on,’ said one official who attended their meetings. ‘She twinkled at DD. It was awful, it was like your grandparents flirting. Everybody wanted the ground to open up and swallow them whole.’

At Hill’s instigation, and with Katie Perrior’s encouragement, James Chapman – a former political editor of the Daily Mail who had been George Osborne’s special adviser – joined as Davis’s special adviser and chief of staff. The appointment raised eyebrows since it was a leap to go from the man most determined to stop Brexit to work for the minister now charged with delivering it, but Chapman was highly intelligent, calm under pressure and brought a deep knowledge of the Eurosceptic press, who would have to be kept on side through the negotiations. It was to be a mistake for both him and Davis.

To start with, DExEU was ‘a total and utter shambles’. Four ministers were crammed into 9 Downing Street, where there had previously been just one. ‘The department didn’t function properly,’ said one official. ‘One of the floors was a courtroom which we couldn’t change because it was a listed building. The press office people were sitting in the dock in the Supreme Court of the Colonies.’ The brass plaque on the front door still read ‘Chief Whip’s Office’.

DExEU was able to coax highly regarded officials to join from across Whitehall since Brexit was a career opportunity, but the civil service had to implement an outcome in which many did not believe. In Brussels, Ivan Rogers gave his staff a pep talk: ‘You’re going to be integral to the biggest negotiation the country’s ever done and your expertise is valued. But if you can’t work for a government that’s delivering a Brexit – and that may be a hard Brexit – don’t do it. Walk out.’ Very few did. But DExEU officials were hamstrung by not knowing May’s planned destination. ‘It could be anything from staying in the EEA to hard Brexit,’ an official said. ‘They didn’t really know where to start.’

The architecture created by Heywood and the chiefs created two problems, which would hamper the government’s planning for the next year. As the lead department, DExEU was both a key participant and expected to be an honest broker with other departments. A cabinet minister said, ‘DD was both a player and the referee.’ The resentments led to briefings against Davis and his new department. ‘There was a turf war,’ said a senior DExEU official. ‘The Foreign Office was massively put out and wanted to demonstrate that DExEU didn’t know what they were doing. We had to fight against that backdrop. It was Jeremy Heywood’s fault. There should never have been a separate department.’

The second problem concerned the official who was to play the most important role in the Brexit negotiations. Oliver Robbins was appointed not only permanent secretary at DExEU, the most senior mandarin in charge of the department, but also the prime minister’s personal EU envoy – her ‘sherpa’, in Brussels parlance. Tall, mild-mannered and bespectacled, Robbins was a labrador of a man but with the brains of a fox. Just forty-one when he got the jobs, he had little EU experience. What he did have was the patronage of Jeremy Heywood – who was grooming him as a successor – the trust of Theresa May, from a spell as second permanent secretary in the Home Office, and the power of incumbency as David Cameron’s last Europe adviser. He had also served as the prime minister’s principal private secretary during the handover from Tony Blair to Gordon Brown and as the director of intelligence and security in the Cabinet Office. He combined his Rolls-Royce CV with bags of intelligence and sharp elbows clothed in a slightly old-fashioned pompous bonhomie.

Ivan Rogers told Robbins he was taking on too much. ‘You’ve got two impossible jobs,’ he said. ‘Try sticking to one impossible job. The only job that really matters is sherpa because you have to be her eyes and ears around the circuit. You need to be the person to whom people transmit messages if they want to get them to the prime minister. If you’re not that, you’re toast.’

Robbins disagreed. ‘It would be harder to do one job and not the other,’ he said. A year later it was decided this was a mistake.

Robbins had May’s trust. On foreign trips, other officials watched jealously as he talked to the prime minister alone, without Hill or Timothy listening in. ‘He was allowed to have conversations with her one on one,’ a colleague said. A senior mandarin who worked closely with Robbins described him as ‘an upwards manager’, good at ingratiating himself with his bosses, less so with his peers.

Robbins’ split role created tensions with David Davis. ‘DD and Olly didn’t see each other regularly enough and Olly was travelling an enormous amount,’ a colleague said. Robbins’ office in 70 Whitehall was a ten-minute walk from Davis’s in 9 Downing Street. ‘The consequence was they hardly ever saw each other. You want your minister and your permanent secretary – who is also the PM’s sherpa – to be talking to each other all the time and they didn’t.’ That meant May’s two key advisers on Brexit ‘weren’t properly aligning where they were headed’. The official said, ‘DD was therefore saying things in public that were contrary to what Olly thought was a sensible position.’

It was clear to Davis that Robbins put more time and effort into the Downing Street half of his job. ‘His primary concern was the relationship with Nick [Timothy] because he knew nothing was decided by anyone else,’ a DExEU source said. Robbins was not alone in this attitude. Those who had served in the Cabinet Office’s EU secretariat could not see the point of DExEU. ‘There was resentment among the officials that they had ministers at all,’ said a source close to Davis. ‘They just thought they should report to Number 10.’ Davis war-gamed various scenarios for the Brexit negotiations but could never get Robbins to discuss ‘the plan’ – the strategy for the negotiation, which cards Britain held and when they should be played. More than one official concluded, ‘It was all in Olly’s

Reviews for Fall Out

[eyejaybee · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Tim Shipman’s previous book, All Out War, gave an engaging and detailed account of the lead up to the UK’s referendum on membership of the European Union, and the immediate aftermath, covering the resignation of David Cameron and the subsequent internecine strife within the Conservative Party that led to Theresa May becoming Prime Minister. Fall Out picks up the story, and covers the year that followed her ascension to Downing Street, culminating shortly after the unexpectedly inconclusive general election of June 2017.I seem to have read a lot of volumes of political history over the last few years. I had always been interested in politics, anyway, and that preoccupation has been piqued through working in a number of different ministers’ private offices across a couple of government departments. This was, however, the first time that I had read such an impartial account published quite so soon after the events that it relates. Much of Shipman’s mastery lies in the immediacy of his account.I don’t know where his own political preferences lie. I remember most of the events that he recounts very clearly, and feel that he has maintained an impartial perspective throughout. While never reluctant to convey disdain of certain politicians’ obtuseness, he scatters his scorn even-handedly. I was particularly impressed by the range of politicians and senior officials with whom he seems to have spoken, also right across the political divide. One of the most illuminating aspects of the book is his account of the reign of terror conducted by Theresa May’s senior political advisers, Fiona Hill and Nick Timothy. Their scorn was distributed fairly evenhandedly, too, and they were clearly just as happy bullying and ridiculing ministers of state as they were to terrorise mere officials. Disappointingly, Theresa May seems, at best, to have turned a blind eye to their disgraceful behaviour, although the insinuation that she approved of, even if never specifically commissioning, their activities is difficult to challenge.Regardless of the political complexion of the government, I have always believed that it is in everyone’s interest that we have a strong opposition. Shipman makes clear that, following the as yet unhealed internal divisions within the Conservatives following their post-Referendum leadership contest, the Government seemed holed below the waterline, and offered an easy target for Her Majesty’s Opposition. Only there was no Opposition. While the Conservative tore themselves apart following David Cameron’s resignation, they did at least manage to appoint a new leader within a matter of a few weeks. Meanwhile, the Labour Party, having gone through one painful leadership contest that resulted with apparent rank outsider Jeremy Corbyn emerging as runaway winner, chose to plunge itself into a second contest, rendering the same result but with an even bigger margin, although it took several months to do so. All of which makes the Labour resurgence in the 2017 general election such a surprise.The clear lesson from Shipman’s book is the enduring peril of political hubris. Labour centrists refused to believe that the party could appoint a genuinely socialist leader, while Theresa May failed to acknowledge the possibility that she would not be returned to Downing Street with a Thatcheresque landslide majority. As in a Greek tragedy, in which the oracle has offered its occluded prophesy, both those conceits would be punctured in the most brutal fashion. Unfortunately, amusing though such outcomes and fractured vanities might appear in the abstract, the consequent uncertainly currently remains unresolved. I am intrigued to know what Mr Shipman’s next book might be, but suspect that I might find the ending rather frightening.